Turns Out Getting Flies to Vape Isn’t So Easy After All by Ari Sasson

“Mom, I need cigarettes”

“You need WHAT? YOU MAY NOT BE SMOKING”

“Mom, it's for a science project”

And thus began my independent project: studying the effect of nicotine on fly learning capability. If you’ve watched the news for at least five minutes in the past 3 years, you’ve probably heard of this small flash drive shaped thing called a JUUL. It’s everywhere, especially high schools. Because of its large presence in youth culture, I decided to study how using such a device might impact academic success. Now, I ran into a big problem really quick. Flies can’t vape. SO? Just put nicotine in their food, right? Well, what sets JUUL’s apart from other ways to consume nicotine is the high concentration it releases at once, and that wouldn't be accurately replicated with nicotine in the fly food, so, I tried a few ideas out. 

The first thing I tried to do was suck the vape from a JUUL out with a syringe. This isn’t my proudest idea, but the thought process was in the right direction (It really wasn't). I bought a syringe, contacted a friend with a JUUL, and tried using the syringe. It didn't work. 

Back to the drawing board I went.

At this point, It was the day before our first lab day, so I opted for putting nicotine in the fly food. This is where my mom came in. After a few minutes of discussion, she obliged. It turned out that there was a nicotine solution in the lab on Thursday, meaning I didn’t need the cigarettes. This was probably for the better, mostly because I have no clue how to get the nicotine out of one...

I still wanted to simulate vaping as closely as possible, so I looked for a way to give the flies as much nicotine as I could in a short period of time. I knew I had to use the cigarettes to make a nicotine solution, so I opted to use part of the stock solution to make a 10 times strength nicotine solution that I would give to the flies while they completed the memory assay. The goal behind this is to give the flies an elevated nicotine dose directly before and after learning the memory assay to simulate high school students using a vape device while in school or at home studying.

Troubleshooting these problems makes me even more excited to see how my experiment turns out. I don’t know if the nicotine will have an effect at all, or if the 10x solution is lethal, or how closely this would simulate humans, but I can’t wait to find that out. As I head into my first data collection day, I can address issues that come up, solve problems I don’t even know exist yet, and continue to refine my project until the final presentation.